New Restrictions, Banning the Export of All Raw Minerals
New Restrictions, Banning the Export of All Raw Minerals
In February 2026, Zimbabwe announced a sweeping prohibition on the export of unprocessed minerals, extending its earlier lithium-ore ban to cover lithium concentrates as well. The country thereby joined a growing club: since 2023, at least thirteen African states have introduced some form of raw-mineral export restriction. For lawyers advising mining companies, traders and investors, these measures are reshaping the legal landscape of the commodities trade — and raising questions that go well beyond mining policy.
What the new restrictions provide
Zimbabwe, Africa’s leading lithium producer, no longer permits the export of raw minerals or lithium concentrates. The declared objective is in-country beneficiation: instead of shipping spodumene concentrate abroad for refining — over 1.1 million metric tons left the country in 2025 — producers are expected to process it domestically into intermediate products such as lithium sulphate, which can then be refined into battery-grade material. The government frames the policy around transparency, local value addition and accountability in the mineral sector, and has set an ambition of supplying a fifth of the world’s lithium. The stakes are continental. Africa holds roughly 30% of global critical-mineral reserves; the Democratic Republic of Congo alone accounts for about 70% of world cobalt output, Guinea dominates bauxite, and Mozambique and Tanzania hold major graphite deposits. As the energy transition drives demand for these inputs, export restrictions have become the policy instrument of choice for governments seeking a larger share of the value chain.
The legal dimension
From a legal standpoint, measures of this kind generate consequences on at least four levels.
Contracts. Existing offtake, supply and streaming agreements tied to raw concentrate are directly affected. Whether a statutory export ban excuses non-delivery depends on the contract’s force majeure and change-in-law clauses, the governing law, and how “illegality” of performance is treated. Buyers and traders should expect renegotiation pressure, and new contracts in the region will need carefully drafted regulatory-risk allocation, including price and delivery adjustments triggered by beneficiation requirements.
Investment protection. Abrupt restrictions can engage bilateral investment treaties and investment chapters where foreign investors built their business models on export of unprocessed product. Claims based on fair and equitable treatment or indirect expropriation are conceivable where bans are imposed without transition periods. Conversely, gradual, transparent implementation — the approach analysts urge — substantially reduces treaty exposure.
Trade law. Quantitative export restrictions sit uneasily with WTO disciplines, in particular the general prohibition on export bans and quotas, subject to limited exceptions such as conservation of exhaustible natural resources. Enforcement through WTO dispute settlement is currently slow, but the tension is part of the legal risk picture for any state adopting such measures.
Licensing and compliance. On the ground, the immediate legal reality is administrative: new permit categories, beneficiation thresholds, and export-authorisation procedures. Observers in Zimbabwe report weak compliance — concentrate continues to leak across borders — and warn that convoluted licensing creates fertile ground for corruption, with permits ending up in the wrong hands. Proposed remedies are themselves legal-institutional: a comprehensive mining land registry, integrated with geospatial mapping and production reporting so that declared output can be reconciled with export filings, backed by a credible enforcement apparatus.
Why bans alone may not deliver
Mining analysts broadly agree that restrictions unaccompanied by enabling conditions tend to backfire. Processing lithium is energy- and water-intensive — upwards of 50,000 litres of water per metric ton — in a country prone to drought, where the mining sector already consumes half of the electricity supply and outages are routine. Companies attempting to comply are drawing heavily on water needed by communities, agriculture and livestock.
Policy experts therefore argue that the sequence matters: reliable energy, infrastructure, investment incentives and sound governance should come first, with export restrictions following once the fundamentals exist. An alternative or complementary tool is contractual — using agreements with foreign buyers to secure binding commitments on infrastructure, skills development and technology transfer before access to resources is granted. Several analysts also urge a “green beneficiation” pathway, integrating solar and wind generation into processing plans to ease the power constraint.
The economic case for value addition is nonetheless real. Zimbabwe’s lithium export earnings rose from roughly $70 million to over $200 million within a year of its first restrictions, and the sector has attracted more than $1 billion in foreign investment, much of it from Chinese companies building mines and battery-material plants.
The coordination question
A further legal-policy debate concerns negotiating posture. Speaking at Davos, the head of the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat warned that uncoordinated national measures squander the continent’s collective leverage, a concern echoed by Sierra Leone’s president. Country-by-country bans, critics argue, let external partners play African states against one another, while a common framework — pooling copper from Zambia, cobalt from the DRC, lithium from Zimbabwe, bauxite from Guinea — could extract stronger commitments on local industry, skills and technology, and create the economies of scale that regional smelters and refineries require. AfCFTA provides an institutional platform for such harmonisation, but it remains largely unused for critical-minerals policy.
Takeaway
Export bans on raw minerals are becoming a fixture of African resource law, and 2026 has confirmed the trend. For governments, the legal craft lies in sequencing: phased implementation, clean licensing, credible registries and treaty-aware drafting. For companies and their counsel, the priorities are equally clear — audit existing contracts for change-in-law exposure, build regulatory risk into new offtake terms, and monitor not only the bans themselves but the administrative machinery through which they are enforced. In this sector, the legal text of the restriction is only the beginning of the analysis.